72 hours: DMGDR – Part two, DJ Monty

Depeche Mode have built up one of the most musically influential and obsessive fan bases in the world, particularly in Berlin and the former East Germany. This ...

A.J. Samuels

DJ Monty co-hosts Master And Servant—a monthly Depeche Mode themed BDSM and sex party, where visitors are encouraged to “go beyond mere dancing” and explore the true meaning of DM classics such as “Stripped”, “Freelove”, “Sea of Sin” and “A Pain that I’m Used To”. This is the second in a six-part series of conversations with the fans. Click here for more.

My roots are actually in the Berlin techno scene, which is where the entire active sex and BDSM scenes in Berlin originated. In fact, it’s traceable to a very specific series of events: one night—or maybe it was one day; we had a terrible sense of time when partying back then—Kirsten and Thaur of KitKatClub fame decided spontaneously to fuck in the middle of the dance floor downstairs in the legendary trance-oriented Bunker Club. Because of all the strobes and dry ice, you couldn’t entirely make out what was going on, but people figured it out soon enough and started to follow suit, because it somehow fit so well to the music. Pretty soon, every weekend, you had gaggles of writhing bodies on the dancefloor and when it achieved a critical mass, Kirsten and Thaur realized their true calling and founded the original KitKatClub in Berlin-Kreuzberg—one of the first truly techno-based sex clubs in the world. I ended up working there for a few years before moving on to manage a more exclusively BDSM club known as Darkside, also located in Kreuzberg.

Darkside was less about sex per se and more about pure bondage. Most people who only spend time in the vanilla world don’t really know there’s a difference. But indeed, the difference is immense. I worked as a manager at Darkside for around four years and eventually felt compelled to try something new musically, because I was getting sick of incessantly hearing Gregorian chants and mystical new-age crap. So we hatched a plan to incorporate a fat chunk of Depeche Mode songs into a DJ set one night . . . and that’s when everything changed. Almost immediately, the guests stopped playing their little bondage games and made their way to the dancefloor. After a while, they continued with the bondage, the whips, the chains, the rubber, the dominance, the submission to the music—which was extremely exciting. This truly felt like something new; it felt like it was a perfect match. That’s when we had the idea to put an entire BDSM-play party together surrounding Depeche Mode’s music here in Berlin’s youngest and most active fetish club, Insomnia. The fact that the band never released a maxi without multiple remixes helps to diversify what gets played at our parties, although in the scene, there’s a real split between those who only enjoy the band in its purest form and those who also dig techno versions of the originals.

This is our sixth year anniversary at this location and the audience just gets bigger and bigger. That said, within the Depeche Mode fan scene and within the sex/fetish scene, we’ve had some resistance to combining the two. For example, on the fetish website JOYClub, Mode purists accused us of having “raped” the band . . . for profit! Obviously that’s utter nonsense, as the connection between Depeche Mode and BDSM is pretty straight forward, in my opinion. If you look at the outfits that Martin Gore wore in the eighties, it was all SM gear. The song texts and titles—“Freelove”, “Strangelove”, “Master And Servant”—they’re all about an unmistakable mix of sex, pain and love, while instrumentally, it’s a perfect mix of quiet and ponderous on the one hand and loud and pounding on the other. I also think this is the reason why women and men listen to Depeche Mode in roughly equal numbers, which is also reflected in our parties.

When it comes to fucking to Depeche Mode, there are lots of different songs that fit to lots of different kinds of sex, and some not at all. Again, an incredible variety. For S&M play, “A Pain That I’m Used To” is probably one of my favorites, while for straight up “girlfriend” sex, “Freelove” can be fantastic. Dave has as much sex in his voice as Martin has in his arrangements. At our parties, people usually end up wandering off to the club’s darker corners or upstairs to the mattresses to fuck during the quieter tracks—“A Question of Lust”, “Somebody” or “Blasphemous Rumours”. Naturally, some people continue to dance, but the atmosphere changes. It all gets a bit hotter. For me, Depeche Mode gives “functional music” new meaning.